too busy burning
by egelantier
Summary: During the years of darkness, injured Ignis shows up at Prompto's door.


It's not that Ignis appearing on Prompto's doorstep at 2 am is a rare occurrence in itself: Ignis' circadian rhythm went haywire pretty quick after he's lost his sight, and at some point, Ignis just gave up and began living on his own schedule. But the thing is, Ignis is normally well aware of his idiosyncrasies, and also the kind of a person to hold onto the begone formalities with an iron grip, and so - an occasional 2 am visit yes, but not without a message or a call beforehand.

It leaves Prompto blinking dumbly at Ignis who's hovering just outside of the door like a disheveled, mud-splattered vampire. Lestallum is never dark, and the mercilessly bright street lamps make Ignis squint, and probably hurt his eyes. Speaking of - the visor?

"Prompto," Ignis says, somewhere between polite and nobody-will-ever-find-your-body tone normally reserved for the aftermath of especially messy hunts, "may I come in?"

"Um," Prompto says, eloquently, and tries to physically shake himself into better awareness. "I mean, yes! Obviously!"

"Thank you," Ignis says. He steps in, stumbling a bit over the threshold, and red neon alarm lights begin going off in Prompto's mind, because blind or not, late at night or not, Ignis has been over many enough times he knows the entire apartment like the back of his hand. And there's this familiar smell in the air...

Ignis shrugs out of his leather coat with a weird, constrained movement that looks like he's trying not to move his arms too much. "Iggy," Prompto says, shaking his head to dispel the last of the cobwebs, "are you okay?"

"Yes," Ignis says, "of course, I've brought good news - "

\- and crumples forward, knees hitting the cheap linoleum of the apartment with a dull thump.

Prompto's body, thank the Six, is faster than his brain, and so he lunges just in time to catch Ignis before he bashes his head open on the stray bits-and-ends filled wooden box by the wall.

"What the _hell_," Prompto asks the uncaring universe. Ignis doesn't answer. Prompto's hand lands on Ignis' back and comes away unpleasantly and familiarly wet. Prompto shifts him to take a better look: there's a long slash going through Ignis' shirt and jacket both, and a haphazardly tied, soaked through bandage peeking through the tear.

Prompto swears and adjusts his grip, shifting his arms until his holding Ignis under his armpits. He gets up, groaning as he forces his knees to take Ignis' dead weight, and half-carries, half-drags Ignis down the short hallway into the room. He's for once thankful that the apartment is nothing but a glorified shoebox, a small room with his lone futon on the floor and a kitchenette to the side, because hard-earned muscles or not, he wouldn't be able to get Ignis much further.

They land on the futon in mostly controlled descent. Prompto wiggles from under Ignis and tries to settle him down in the best approximation of recovery position he can manage. He checks Ignis' breathing: it's raspy and uneven but unobstructed, and it's more comforting than it has any right to be.

For a moment he wishes _really intensely_ that he could just call _somebody_ \- an ambulance, he thinks wistfully, remember the times when there were ambulances? - and make them come and take care of Ignis in reassuring hospital sterility. Hell, he'd settle for Gladio right now, except that Gladio is accompanying a supplies caravan to Galdin Quay, blissfully unaware of how Ignis is spending his free time.

_Right_, Prompto thinks, and pinches his thigh, hard: time to stop dithering. He makes an executive decision that both jacket and shirt are done for, and if Ignis will wake up with any complaints, he can take them up with whoever tried to bisect him.

He scuttles toward the pile of equipment in the corner of the room and gets the first aid kit out. He cuts the clothes away, gingerly, and then the bandage - it's loose and blood-soaked enough to be completely useless - and winces as they reveal a long, deep bleeding gash underneath, just under the bottom edge of Ignis' ribcage, its edges red and slightly hot to touch. It ends just a couple of centimeters shy of Ignis' spine, but even so - Prompto has a sudden flash of Ignis, holed up at some haven or another, trying to reach around to put enough pressure on the wound, knowing it won't really work for long. Back injuries are a _bitch_ to deal with on your own, and that alone must've galled Ignis, who generally thinks that the world can get browbeaten into submission by stubbornness alone.

Prompto's mind is a mess - of admiration, of irritation, of pity - but his hands are careful and steady. At least the gash seems to have missed anything vital; Ignis must be checked out due to the combination of blood loss and exhaustion, nothing more sinister.

Prompto fills a bowl with water, and cleans the gash carefully and thoroughly, feeling _intensely_ grateful for Ignis' cooperative unconsciousness. He hesitates before reaching for the sutures, but the gash is too deep to be managed with bandages alone, and Ignis has already lost too much blood.

He kind of really hates that he knows how to stitch people up, now - learning how to deal with wounds for long enough for the potions to work was bad enough, thank you very much, and now the potions are a precious communal commodity, given out only to people who would die otherwise. He's pretty good at this by now - between him, Gladio and Ignis, he gets plenty of practice - but he never fails to notice the queasily firm give of skin under the needle tip and hate it all over again.

"Just you wait until Gladio hears about it," he tells Ignis to distract himself. The edges of the gash are creepily tidy; Prompto's money will be on Yojimbo, and Ignis _knows_ that nobody is supposed to hunt Yojimbos, or hang around the spaces where they might be, alone. Ignis helped to write the new hunter protocols that specified just that, for fuck's sake. "You're going to be in so much trouble, you asshole. Was it so much to ask for somebody to go with you?"

A silly question; of course not. Between him and Gladio, they had managed to keep Ignis safe and protected for about three weeks, while he adjusted to his new state. Then Ignis, full of prophecies and visions and Astrals knew what, declared that he had no time for this nonsense, not when they were on a schedule to save Noct, and barreled forward with wild abandon.

Training, taking care of himself, learning to orient by the traces of ambient magic. Learning to fight blind. The joke about being used to darkness ahead of everybody was trotted out at every opportunity and well-trodden into the ground. And to be fair, Ignis _did_ learn astonishingly quickly, either by his native sheer stubbornness or because the Six were guiltily assisting him on the sly - but sometimes Prompto misses those early days when Ignis would accept a guiding hand on his elbow, and a hug before sleep. Just a bit.

He's tying off the last stitch when Ignis stirs under his hands. He can track the stages of his wakefulness: dizzy incomprehension, high alert, forced, listening stillness. "Easy," Prompto says, "it's just me. You're in Lestallum, remember?"

"Ah," Ignis says. Prompto snips the thread and pats his back; he has a fleeting, irreverent image of Ignis as a chocobo, lanky and stylishly gloss. "Almost done, don't move, okay?"

He gets up and goes to the kitchen sink; the spigot splutters out a thin stream of water - something must've gone wonky with the pipes again, Lestallum nowadays is an experience in continuous repair - and Prompto washes his hands, watches the brownish swirl of water. "Just a moment," he calls over his shoulder. He fills the kettle and puts it on, hunts for a bottle of bottled water to mix with the boiled one. It takes some time, and he's painfully conscious of Ignis' carefully measured breathing behind him, filling the tiny room. Inhale, exhale, a controlled hitch of pain, inhale, exhale.

Finally, he gets a bowl of warm water together, adds a clean rag and goes back. "Just give me several minutes to clean it up and cover it, and we can try sitting you up."

"Much obliged," Ignis rasps; Prompto winces at the dry scratchiness of his voice. He washes the blood off his fresh handiwork, determined to keep his movements gentle and his voice mild. "Another exciting day in the wilderness, huh?"

Ignis is silent; there's a particular, stubborn tint to his silence that generally means he's aware he's in the wrong, but committed enough to being there to buy some land estate. Who would've thought Ignis would end up being a problem child?

"Must've been really important," Prompto continues, hearing the anger creep into his voice and unable to stop himself, "whatever you were doing, right? Maybe important enough to tell somebody where you were going? To get some backup?"

His hands, at least, he can keep gentle; he finishes the cleanup and covers the stitches with a pad soaked with the broad-spectrum antibiotic gel. Ignis tries to get up immediately, the bitten-off sound of pain notwithstanding. "Thank you for your help," he says, pointedly. "If I could trouble you for my clothes?"

"Dead on arrival," Prompto says, somehow viciously. "Are you really going to try and go back out right now? Like, that's what we're doing here?"

"I apologize for troubling you."

Prompto grits his teeth. "I haven't seen you for like three months, you've staggered in about three centimeters to the left from being dead, and you are going to be an asshole about it? What the hell, Igster. You tell me if it's how we are doing things now."

Ignis finally rights himself, turning a baleful milky gaze in Prompto's direction. "It seems to me that you're somehow overstating the matter. I miscalculated the threat level, that's all. If I knew it would upset you so much, I'd have aimed at the nearest hospital."

Prompto throws his hands up. "Which is something that _would not have happened_ if you took anybody with you. Where were you, anyway?"

It's not much of an olive branch, but Ignis takes it anyway, obviously eager to move on with his routine of destroying Prompto's nerves forever. "At the ruins near the Rock of Ravatogh, searching for information. And I've found it!"

("That's it!", Prompto's mind supplies, unhelpfully, and he has to stifle a nervous and completely inappropriate giggle.)

"Well," he says instead, "share."

Ignis hesitates but continues. "I found the remains of the imperial presence at the ruins and the evidence that the daemons there were somehow - tampered with. The next logical step would be to go straight to the source. I'm going to check out the nearest Imperial base and work my way from there. And now, if you excuse me, I'd like to stock up for the trip..."

"Ignis," Prompto says, with frankly saintly patience. "If you try to move one step off this futon, I'm knocking you out and calling Gladio. I'm serious."

Ignis makes an aborted half-motion upwards anyway, and Prompto glowers at him, because he's, for once, deadly serious. Ignis must feel it, with that finely honed ambient awareness of him, because he subsides.

"It's not really a bad injury," he offers, in a tone that passes for conciliatory for Ignis nowadays. "If the location was not so inconvenient, I would've dealt with it himself. Perchance you're being just a bit overdramatic about it?"

"Perhaps," Prompto says, goaded, "I'd rather not be the one telling Noct you didn't make it."

He regrets those words the moment they leave his mouth, but it's too late to snatch them back. Ignis stiffens like an affronted cat - man, he must be really out of it, quarrel or not, because normally his reactions are much better controlled - and hisses in pain as the movement pulls on fresh stitches. His voice is glacially cold. "Perhaps I prefer to focus on securing Noct's return rather than this mollycoddling you deem necessary."

Prompto's stomach tightens unpleasantly; he feels the urge to just - get out, right now, go running; but it's his house, and hell if he'd get chased out of it. Not to mention that if he does, Ignis is just going to up and leave, and, as their luck goes, end up in a ditch somewhere, and Prompto just can't -

He breathes in, slowly, trying to center himself.. "Ignis," he says, aiming for let's-be-reasonable-here calm he doesn't really feel, "come on. Like that's true. You're out there, hunting shit solo, are you not? It's not like we tried to lock you up and force you to take up knitting."

Ignis makes a sound that suspiciously resembles a snort if Ignis ever snorted.

"And it's unfair to carry on like you're the only person who cares about Noct, or wants to help him. You want to find the information, fine! I'm right here, Gladio will be right here if you let him - all we ask is that you let us help you. How come it's mollycoddling?"

"You both have your own work to do here, and I'm perfectly capable - "

"Fucking Six, Ignis, give me a fucking _break_. Excuse us for freaking out for a bit after you went away with the enemy and we found you _burned to death_. You adjusted on the fly, great! But we didn't even hunt solo when Noct was here, and now it's all you want to do?"

Ignis sags back onto the futon, opening his mouth and closing it again, looking uncharacteristically lost for words. FInally, he says with the air of somebody whose words are forced from him, "There's just not enough time. I _know_ there's a way to save him, and I need to find it, but there's just not. Enough. Time!"

"_We_," Prompto says, quietly. "We, Ignis. Come on, man. We, damn you. What's going to happen to your grand plan if you fuck off somewhere and get killed?"

"All my notes are with Talcott," Ignis says, stiffly. "I do tend to plan for contingencies, you know."

"Of course you do," Prompto says, viciously. "Well, you know what? I don't want to be the one to tell Noct you went and got himself killed in some Six-forsaken dungeon because you were too freaking proud to rely on your fucking _friends_."

"Friends," he says, running out of anger and indignation both, "who love you, in case you've somehow forgotten. Why the fuck do you think we're not going to care?"

His voice breaks; this is more than he wanted to say, and it's unlikely that Ignis, obsessed as he is right now, would even _notice_. At least there was no need to turn away to try and hide the tears. Ignis can probably smell the salt in the air between them anyway.

"Prompto," Ignis says, quietly. "I'm - I swear it wasn't my intention to cause you any distress."

Prompto swallows the three first decidedly unhelpful retorts. "Well," he says, and can't think of how to continue.

"It could be said that I've developed something of - ah - tunnel vision?"

He can't help snorting at that; his relief tastes bitter in the back of his throat. "You're an asshole, just so you know."

"It's been said on occasion, yes. So - where does it leave us? And for how long am I to stay on this futon, by the way, Gladio's displeasure and all?"

"Tell you what," Prompto says. "You stay until you're healed up properly, without complaints or fucking your back up, and I don't tell Gladio on you."

"But time..."

"And then," Prompto continues ruthlessly, "you and I are going to check out that base you wanted to scout. Together."

He glares at Ignis, and Ignis sags down and meekly says, "Okay, Prompto."

"And the next one. And the next after that. Either Gladio, or me, or you call Aranea, or you get some hunters together, I don't care. Because if you don't, I swear to fuck I'm going to get Gladio and kidnap you and lock you up somewhere, and you'll have to execute your grand plan by giving us instructions. Think how miserable _that_ is going to be."

Ignis actually smiles at him, a narrow, uncomfortably shark-like flash of teeth. "Really? Just how well do you think it's going to go for you?"

"Watch me," Prompto says. "Come on, man, give me something to work with, here."

"I suppose," Ignis says, with great dignity, "it wouldn't hurt to ensure that I'm at peak performance for that trip. And I - would appreciate some company."

Prompto hates, for a moment, just how happy it makes him. He wants to keep pushing; he wants to make Ignis _understand_ \- to admit that he needs them, that they need him, that Prompto needs… But Ignis is tense across from him, and it's clear how much even this concession costs him; Prompto imagines he can hear the hum of his obsession, the brilliant hunger of his purpose.

In the face of it, what can Prompto do? He smiles at Ignis instead and goes to put on a fresh kettle of water. Work with what you get, he thinks, bitter and satisfied; get back into safer waters.

"It's going to be a great trip! Just like good old times!"

"If by that you mean you're going to snore in the tent and push your feet into my face, I just can't wait."

"You love it and you know it, don't front." He turns just in time to see a fleeting smile on Ignis' face. "C'mon," he says, "let's get you settled in properly. No shower for you right now, but would you like to clean up?"

"Yes _please_," Ignis says, immediately.

"One sponge bath, coming right up. Say 'thank you, nurse'!"

They get Ignis cleaned up and dressed - with some trepidation - into Prompto's longest sweatpants and a hoodie that still left his ankles and wrists sticking out. Ignis, being in possession of some ridiculous Ignis magic, still manages to look stylishly weird rather than hilarious, not that Prompto tells him that.

They share Prompto's offering of stir-fry rice - he had to go to the food distribution office tomorrow and register Ignis as his roommate for the time of his convalescence, so he could apply for rations for him as well - and while Ignis's table (well, futon for now) manners were habitually impeccable, Prompto still gets a feeling that eating didn't really figure high on the list of Ignis' priorities for a while now.

After food, Ignis begins quite obviously nodding off, and Prompto allows the last dregs of his grudge dissipate into watching Ignis, ever a polite guest, try and pretend he isn't exhausted for ten solid minutes before he takes pity on him.

"Hey, I don't know about you, but I've been planning to sleep in today. Right or left side for you?"

The adrenaline of Ignis' appearance and subsequent fight is draining away, leaving him shaken and exhausted. He manages enough coordination to drag himself up and twitch the blackout curtains (a necessity in ever-shining Lestallum) into a more secure position, and to dig for a spare blanket for Ignis, and somnambulistically brush his teeth, and by the time he crawls onto the futon, Ignis is out like a light, nothing more but an indistinct facedown lump under the blanket.

Perversely, the moment Prompto hugs his own pillow, the sleep flees. He can feel the frantic beat of his heart, high in his throat, and the imaginary heat of Ignis' blood creeps back onto his fingers. A centimeter to the left, and Ignis would've been lost forever.

They wouldn't even have known; the travel is scarce nowadays, nobody goes to heavily daemon-infested old ruins without good reason, and by the time he and Gladio would've realized that neither had seen or heard from Ignis for a while and began searching, his body would've been long eaten by beasts or daemons. Maybe something of Ignis' possessions - a torn red-soled shoe, a cane, a cracked visor - would've found its way to them eventually, and maybe not; maybe all they'd be left with would be an empty space where Ignis was.

The idea of explaining Ignis' absence to Noct is unbearable; but, selfishly, the idea of never seeing Ignis again is even more so. And even though Ignis had gotten lucky this one time, had made his way back to Prompto - to civilization - who could say that the next time would go better? Relying on Ignis' self-preservation instincts is obviously ridiculous.

Prompto squeezes his eyes shut in the darkness, stares at the bright concentric rings of light under his eyelids; he suddenly wants nothing more but to wake Ignis up and shout at him, shake him until his teeth clatter, until his stitches tear, until Prompto can shake him apart and put him back together better. _But what about us_, he'd shout. _What about me_, and the plaintive hopelessness of those words puncture his imaginary fury and leave him shaking and cold.

He turns over, hoping like hell that Ignis is too done in by exhaustion, painkillers and pain to sleep heavier than usual, and finds Ignis' hand by touch, puts his palm over it.

"I can't make it better," he whispers. "I can't make you care about anything until Noct comes back, I know it. But I'm not leaving you alone anymore, okay? I'm going to stick by you until it's all over. It's going to be alright."

Ignis sleeps on, unchanged, but in the darkness, Prompto imagines that the tense line of his shoulders relaxes somehow. His own breathing evens out; Ignis' hand under his fingers, with its patch of old burns, is warm and solid - real.

For tonight, everything is okay. Tomorrow, Prompto is going to make it better.


End file.
